“That’s how this Christmas season has seemed to me.”, she said, pointing toward the small, ornamental stone fountain I have in the corner of my office. That morning I had been too busy to plug it in, leaving the wall of stone dry, with only the mineral deposits of water making white streaks on the gray background. I looked at her and knew what she meant. Some holiday seasons are just like that. They miss our expectations by a long shot for all kinds of reasons. Instead of the heady energy of joy and celebration, we find ourselves in another kind of land, swimming against a current that seems foreign and mean spirited. Because I knew some of the things going on in her life I understood how her description could be true. I took in a deep breath and hoped my eyes spoke care and concern and compassion.

The holiday season is now past and yet I continue to think back on it with some longing. The terrible respiratory illness that has been dancing its way through people’s lives added its name to my dance card a few days before Christmas. For the majority of all the festivities and traditions that are so ingrained in our family, I was in a suspended state brought on by fever and the side effects of cold and flu medications. While they may help in the short term, they have the effect of making you feel mostly stupid with numbness. It has all lingered longer than seems realistic. And yet now that I am finally on the other side of it, I have thought back on the woman’s statement and how in many ways it was my own experience of this particular Christmas season.

As someone who makes their life in the church business, these holidays can have a set of expectations that are difficult for anyone to achieve or produce. The longing and hopes drummed up by Christmas movies and advertisements reach into those places that get at deep crevices in us. It is easy to over reach toward some Hollywood experience of a sweet and spectacular script that has its final moments in candlelight and music and over the top happiness. It can be a set up for a pretty hard fall into disappointment or at least melancholy.

This particular Christmas season was home to many deaths within our church community. As we held the promise of new birth and the Christ Child’s light shining into our midst we also said goodbye to some saints whose lights had been equally bright. The season also saw tragedy and disruption on the world stage. While we held the hope of peace on earth, good will to all, we grappled with the injustice of racism and the on-going warring around the globe. People were ill. Others lost their jobs and were pitched into a whirlwind of fear and hopelessness.

My gut tells me that this is always so. We are not an either-or world but a both-and. Which is why it was somehow comfort for me this past Sunday when our scripture reading came from the book of Ecclesiastes. These words from the Wisdom literature of the Hebrew people rang true to me:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.

While we may live with the rhythm of seasons, seasons we imbue with all kinds power and hopes, we do so in a much larger framework of life. Life with all its beauty and terror. This Christmas season was filled with richness and miracle for some. And it was filled with hopelessness and dryness for others.

Perhaps our work is to continue to light the candles and to sing the songs, to choose to see Light in the darkness and offer it when we can. There is a season and a time for everything under heaven. No matter which side of the phrase we are on, it is good to remember that we ride on the Breath of the One who breathed us, and the seasons, into being.

And so it always will be…..